Shaman

  —Yes, Thorn said shortly.

  But he couldn’t know, as far as Loon could see. Not that Loon doubted that Thorn’s knowledge exceeded his own in many things. And maybe here too. But maybe all he meant to say now was that if given a chance, he would be able to find out where they were. Loon saw by his look not to inquire further. They weren’t going anywhere that day, and even the next day was now questionable; all this new snow dumping down, being blown into drifts, would make the flats difficult and the slopes dangerous. And Loon was discovering he could barely walk. He could not put any weight on Badleg, he felt weak with pain when he tried. Thorn shook his head when he saw that, out near their boulder pile, and waved Loon back to the fire. Nothing to be done now but eat some more leather and wait it out. Find their way when they could move again.

  That night was long. The hungrier you are, the colder you get: they proved this old saying again. They had to eat fire, as it was said; it was all they had. Only the fire kept them going that long night.

  The next day it snowed harder than ever. There was no question of walking in it.

  Late in the day, as the dark got darker, Elga went out and found a little meadow under its snow blanket, and came back with her sack stuffed with meadow onions she had dug up with a stick. They went back out with her and got more.

  Roasting them on the fire made them taste bigger. They were not much in their stomachs, but something to join the leather strings. They ate some portion of the green stalks topping the root bulbs as well, and at one point, chewing on roasted greens, Thorn eyed Elga and said,—I never really wanted to live the swan wife story, but here I am. And only as the old helper at that.

  Elga pursed her lips and shook her head.—I’d fly away if I could, she said.

  Thorn barked his short laugh, not unlike a snort from one of the unspeakable ones, trundling through the forest. He held out one of the meadow onions at her.

  —Have some more goose food and maybe you will.

  Again the night was long. At one point Loon woke from a dream in which his father was warning him against crossing the ice on a river. He had been telling his father that it was all right, that they had already made it across. But now apparently they were supposed to be crossing the other way. It was going to be hard, he said to his father anxiously, with the ice gone.

  The fire was almost out. Just a flicker inside the bed of embers, a pink glimmer all crusted with gray, going black and hissing where snowflakes fell on it. He placed three branches on the bed and fell back asleep before they had even caught fire.

  In the morning Thorn woke them, kneeling on the snow behind Loon and Elga. His lips were pursed and he looked like a big lizard.—Click is dead.

  —What? Loon cried.—How? Why?

  He had not meant to say why, and the word hung there in the air like a hummingbird standing on its own flight. It could have been awkward, but Thorn was busy in his own thoughts, and did not appear to have heard him.

  —I don’t know, he said at last,—he might have choked on something. Or been hungrier than we thought. Anyway he’s dead. Nothing to be done.

  Loon and Elga found themselves sitting up. It was still snowing. Elga had a fist to her mouth, and was looking across the fire at the hide-covered lump that had been Click. His body lay there in its furs, motionless. Loon saw that it was true: there was no mistaking a dead body. So much went away.

  Thorn stood, took one of his deep heavy breaths: in, out.—I’m going to move him away from the fire.

  He stomped unsteadily around the fire to Click, crouched and stared at the old one’s face, which was turned away from Loon and Elga, as if Click did not want them to see him dead. Thorn reached down and pulled the man’s bearskin blanket up over his head. It already wrapped the rest of him; now he was no more than a man-sized lump in a bearskin hide. Thorn grabbed him by the part of the bearskin wrapped around his feet and hauled him away, following the path in the snow they had stomped while passing in and out of their tuck. Snow fell in tumbling flurries, and the hillside pines sang their airy windy song.

  When Thorn had pulled Click’s body out of sight, on the other side of some trees, Loon and Elga could hear him singing one of his shaman songs, one of the ones he sang to help dying people into the next world:

  Now you are going into the sky

  Be at peace we will remember you

  Then for a while there was silence, punctuated by some grunting and thumps. When Thorn returned to the fire he had Click’s coat bunched in his hand. He sat down heavily on his rock by the fire, got one of his blades out of his pack. Without a word he began to cut Click’s coat up into lengths of leather.

  After a long time he suggested that the other two go out and gather firewood. Elga got up and left the tuck, avoiding the way that would lead past Click. Loon stood and hopped around. Badleg would not move at all, and his whole left side ached, also his chest and shoulders. It was clear by the parts of him that were sore that he had made extreme efforts to walk on his poles. He went to the closest trees and knocked around, looking for dead wood under the drifts. Snow flocked down.

  That night was windy. They kept the fire big, and slept hungry.

  The next day was stormy again. They lay wrapped in their furs, staring into the fire. From time to time one of them would get up and venture out to relieve themselves, or to collect more wood. They had a bed of embers now that would burn damp or green wood, so it was not hard to supply the fire. But it was hard to get around in the deepening snow, hard to think about anything but their hunger, eating them from inside. It was hard to believe it was the sixth month. Although sixth-month storms were known to be bad.

  That night was windy again. They kept the fire big, and slept hungrier than ever. And hungry means cold.

  In the gray morning light Thorn built up the fire to a roar, then stood facing east, his arms raised and outstretched. He sang a song with words Loon didn’t know, words so strange that maybe they were just sounds.

  When he was done he turned to face Loon and Elga and put his hands on his hips. They looked up at him from their wraps.

  —We need to eat, he told them.—We can find our way home when this storm is over and the snow settles, but we have to have food, or we can’t do it.

  He stared down at them.

  Elga said,—So we have to eat Click.

  Thorn nodded deeply. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at Loon.

  —Yes, he said.—Exactly. Click has been dead two days. He’s frozen. So I am going to go cut a few steaks out of him, and we will then cook and eat them. It will be tough old meat, but it’s all we’ve got. I’m sorry to do it, but Click will understand. I’ve just finished talking to him about it, and his spirit is well clear of his body by now, out in the stars. He said he is happy to still be of service. He said thank you. Just like he always did.

  Loon glanced at Elga; he could feel all of a sudden that his mouth was hanging open. She returned his gaze, swallowed. Loon closed his mouth, swallowed too. He was salivating. He had to pee, and his mouth was running at the thought of cooked meat.—I have to pee, he said.

  —Go that way, Thorn said, and pointed away from Click.—Then leave me alone. And he tromped through the new snow toward where he had stashed Click’s body, blade in hand.

  Loon got up and went out the other way to pee. The air was frigid. He could feel the hunger in him. The worst of it was not the weakness in the muscles, but the light-headedness. The world around him was depthless, washed out. Trees on the higher slopes bounced in the wind, he couldn’t look at them, he had to turn his head or he would lose his balance. He couldn’t tell how far away things were. This was the real danger that hunger brought, that and the sheer lack of strength.

  Back at the fire he found Elga sitting up, wrapped in her hide and tending the fire. New branches were bursting into flame. She looked up at him and they shared a glance, and Loon could see what she was thinking: nothing to be done. They would back each other in the time to come, te
ll the same story. Nothing to be done. Now it was time to live.

  He sat down beside her in a little collapse, and they wrapped both their hides over their shoulders, over their heads. They huddled together like kits when the vixen is gone.

  Thorn came back with his leather patch wrapped around a mass he held before him with both hands. He sat by the fire and took up a slender old branch, stripped of its bark, and broke off its end. He pulled open his wrap and took a chunk of meat from it, about the size of his fist; rump, by the look of it. Still frozen. He had to poke a hole in it with his blade to get the sharp end of the branch to stick into it. When it was securely stuck on the branch, he held it out into the fire. First right in the flames, to sear the outside; then beside the flames, to thaw it; then above the flames, to cook it. It sizzled a little when fat and blood dripped from it into the fire, but hearing that, Thorn pulled it back and let it steam in the air. A few ticks of snow fell down from the trees over them, pushed by the wind. He tested the meat with his lips, exposed a fang tooth like a cat and bit into it; chewed off a piece, examined the meat where the bite was: pink. It was done. He chewed and swallowed the piece.—Ah, he said.—Thank you.

  He handed the cooked piece, branch and all, to Elga, who thanked him and bit into it matter-of-factly, as she would any other cut. Loon’s mouth was flooded with saliva, and he was glad when she handed him the stick and gave him a bite. The meat tasted a bit like bear meat. Very tough. It was as if Click’s whole body had been made of heart muscle. Briefly Loon’s face spasmed and he cried, but Elga and Thorn ignored that.

  Thorn cooked a second chunk, and as they ate that, he cooked a somewhat smaller third cut, possibly the back or front of a thigh. They passed the stick around and ate in silence. When they were done, Thorn passed around his water bag. He watched the sky for a while; the clouds were still low, scudding quickly east, but they were breaking up too, into dark gray masses separated by bright white filaments, like seed threads.—Lie with that good food in you, let it spread out in you, he said.—You know how it is, after a while your stomach is so empty it forgets how to eat. We shouldn’t go anywhere today anyway, the snow will be too soft. After a while we’ll eat again, and then tomorrow we’ll go.

  And it was true, what he had said about food on an empty stomach; for a time Loon felt sick and hard-bellied. It was easiest just to lie there and watch the fire, clutching Elga by the arm. After a while he felt better: warmer, stronger, clearer in his sight. Later he had to go out in the snow and shit, and back by the fire again, warming back up, he felt better than ever.

  All day the three of them lay there, soaking in the fire’s radiance and warming from the inside as the meat from Click gave them strength. Each went out into the gray windy day from time to time to relieve themselves, or just stomp the feeling back into their feet. Loon was worried to find that Badleg no longer had any feeling in the foot. It didn’t seem frostbitten, but it was largely numb. It was better than pain, but he didn’t see how he could walk.

  Next morning dawned clear and cold, and after one last big build-up of the fire, and another small meal of Click’s cooked flesh, his calves, they stood and gathered their things together, packed their sacks. Quickly they were ready to leave.

  Thorn stopped them.—We’re taking Click with us, he said.—We’re going to need him.

  He held up a rope that he had made out of Click’s coat. He had knotted all the strips he had cut into a line. It was longer than Loon would have thought the coat could stretch, and looked strong. Thorn went out to where he had left Click, and came back hauling the body feet first, wrapped in its bearskin along on the ground, the hide tied at each end by lengths of leather, so that it made a kind of sled which could be pulled over the snow. The rope was long enough for Thorn to be able to wrap it around his middle twice in a quick harness, and return it to the bundle to tie off on the foot tie. He pulled the bundle out of their grove and onto open snow, then came back for his snowshoes and sack. He strapped on his snowshoes while in the sled harness.

  They began walking. The snow was not yet completely settled down, but the snowshoes were once again a big help, holding them ankle deep on snow their boots would have plunged deep into.

  But on the first downhill, Loon fell to his left and could not get back up. Badleg wouldn’t bend at ankle or knee, and he couldn’t feel its foot. He cried out and struggled, got up to his knees, straightened the snowshoes, used his arms and the walking poles to stand, then at the next step fell left again. He stared up at the others helplessly.

  —I told you we would need Click, Thorn said grimly.—Loon. Crawl over here and sit on top of the sled. Lie on your side on it. It won’t make any difference to Click. And we have to move.

  —I’ll pull it, Elga said.—You find the way, she told Thorn.—I’ll pull them.

  —All right, Thorn said.—That’s good. As they got the rope arranged into a harness around Elga’s chest, he added to Loon,—I like your wife.

  Briefly they all laughed.

  It was like lying on a fallen log. They all had done that at one time or another in the forest, lying down for a nap on the flattest surface around. The bearskin wrapping Click covered him completely, and Thorn had it well tied at toe and head. And Click was frozen hard. With her snowshoes on, and two walking branches to propel her, Elga hauled the sled over the snow without many problems. When the snow softened later in the day it would get more difficult. But under the layer of new snow the old snow was rock hard, so Loon and Click would only sink in so far and then stop. And in a day or two the new stuff would get harder too. And Elga was strong.

  When they went downhill, she had to let the sled slide down before her, and had to be careful not to be pulled off her feet when it got steep. Loon could help at these moments by putting Goodleg and one of his poles into the snow to slow them so they did not pull her down. Lying on his side he could look right at Elga’s face on these downhills. On the steeper slopes the creases between her eyebrows formed a deep wedge on her forehead. Her eyes were sunk deep in her head, her top ribs stuck out; the pads of fat behind her eyes and around her ribs were gone.

  Once or twice Thorn led them on traverses down slopes, and she tried to follow, but the sled was always hanging straight downslope from her, so she had to stomp her snowshoes down several times, balancing just so, then stride down and stomp the next step down, leaning back fast if the snow gave way. Loon was frequently astonished by the fluid balance and power of her moves; he did not think he could do what she was doing, even if his leg were fine. Suddenly he saw that she was an ice woman, had grown up in snow. His wife came from a different world, just as Thorn had suggested by the fire with his talk about the swan wife story. She stood there huffing and puffing in the difficult moments, face red, eyes squinted to slits, but her moves were sure. And she kept on making them.

  Thorn too saw the difficulty the sled gave her on traverses, and he began to range ahead, glissading down slopes first to get a look around points of stone, then gesturing up to her to follow, or trudging painfully back up to them to continue in a different direction.

  The valley they were in trended south, and it became clear that Thorn wanted to head east. At midday he stopped for a rest, and while Loon and Elga sat on a log by the sled, he stuck a stick in a flat spot in the snow, and broke other sticks to measure how long the stick’s shadow was at midday. It was the middle of the sixth month; Loon wasn’t exactly sure which day, the moon had been so long hidden by the storm. But Thorn knew. And he also knew, as he explained to them while he broke sticks into different lengths, how long the shadow of a stick would be relative to its height, at midsummer noon in their home camp. Which meant he might be able to see whether they were north or south of their camp, by how much longer or shorter the shadow was than it would be at home. At home the shadow was one-sixth the length of the stick.

  Here, about the same. And because the shadow was close to the same length, he decided, after a close inspection, accompanied by a grea
t deal of muttering, that all they had to do was head east and they would reach home. Because he was quite sure they were west of their camp.

  —We’re lucky I know that, he added,—because there’s no way of telling whether you are east or west of a place, only north or south. Old Pika taught me the trick, and he said his raven taught it to him, and that he was the first human to know it. He was always saying that, but I never heard any other shaman talk about this trick, at the eight eight or anywhere else.

  —If we were east of camp we would be in the big mountains, Elga pointed out.

  —True.

  So. They were to head east when possible. But the valleys in this region were trending south. So it was hard.

  Eventually they climbed over into a narrow but smoothed-floored valley that curved east, and Thorn led them up its floor, somewhat away from the creekbed, on the hardest snow he could find. On they went for the whole of that afternoon. When the sun was low behind them, such that their shadows stretched away in front of them far up the valley, Thorn stopped by a copse of trees where a little snowed-over tributary met the valley’s creek. There was an open lead in the snow where the two creeks met, and this water gurgled happily at them, almost the only sound in the landscape aside from their breathing.

  It was windless at last. Clouds were visible over the horizon to the south. It was going to be cold that night, and Thorn stomped down an area for their fire ring. He had carried another ember in a mass of pine needles, tucked in a burl in his belt; with it he coaxed more of his duff supply into flame. It was very well done, but he did not bother to congratulate himself this time. He pulled Click away from the fire so that he would stay frozen. Loon hopped around on Goodleg and his poles and collected firewood. In this task especially they missed Click’s help, as he could break off branches none of them could. It was almost dark before they had a sufficient supply for the night.

  Once again Thorn squeaked off over the hardening snow, blade in hand. The sky in the west was a rich pure blue, cut off sharply by the hilly black horizon. The lightest part of the blue lay right on the black of the hills, and pulsed and crackled redly in Loon’s eyes. If he opened his mouth he could hear his heart tocking at the back of his throat. He was hungry again.